[earksiinni]

Have you tried renting a truck from Home Depot before? There's no way to reserve one in advance. Most Home Depots have one or maybe two trucks, you just have to show up and hope that it's available.

Uhaul is much more reliable, but in my experience renting from them is expensive and very time consuming. Each checkout usually takes me 20-30 minutes, even when I use the app ahead of time (their app is horrible).

Where I live, I'd say trucks make up 30% of the vehicles on the road. It's a big part of the culture here and extremely practical. There are no practical rental options. Lots of places in the US are like that. That's what led me to eventually buy a pickup for myself.

Someone needs to create Zipcar for trucks for those of us not living in dense urban cores.

[grogenaut]

If you order from a slightly more upscale hardware place they'll do delivery for a reasonable price usually next day. Seattle has a place called Dunn's. Their lumber is somewhat more expensive but it's all premium grade or better and you don't have to sort through 50 2x4s to find 5 good ones. In fact everything I've had delivered was high quality except one piece. I called them back and they swapped it out at no charge to me. Better if you're ordering with a truck you can fit much larger pieces like beams or 20' trex pieces that you can't get in a pickup. Delivery is $75-150 depending on how much of the truck you use last I checked. I stopped getting anything but instant fixed from Lowes or home Depot. For any big project thses places also discount in bulk better. We put in a 1k sqft paver patio. Was half as much buying from a local supplier who delivered for $50 on 5 pallets. No way I could have gotten that in a pickup with or without a forklift. Had a dingo delivered. Sure I could have trailered that but I'd have to rent and return a trailer. It was dropped off by a rental place and picked up a month later included in the rental. 8 minutes of my time. 15 total if you include the phone call to rent. I've spent an hour renting a chipper from home Depot.

Same for metal working. Moving sheet steel by yourself is stupid unless you want to slice up yourself and your vehicle. Deliver trucks have cranes. Even better you can get 24' lengths of tube steel which really cuts down on price. They put the pavers 30 feet from the street sneaking under power line easily.

If your doing a house how many trips are you making with a pickup full of drywall. How much are you racking up in gas in that sucker going to hd?